EU Agriculture Regulations: better data can help farmers be heard
Farmers in the EU are getting frustrated. Fleets of tractors are being used to barricade roads in cities all around Europe. In France, actual manure has been shot into government buildings. At the center of these demonstrations are farmers, working to grow food for our people, but struggling to deal with both current and future industry regulations.
Regulatory requirements
The EU Commission has been rolling out the EU Green Deal, which strives to make the EU the first carbon-neutral continent. The regulations that follow, impact every major industry including agriculture. Within agriculture, the Farm to Fork strategy is being established and a main component will focus on the use of crop treatment products, like fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. The reason, of course, is that these products have some unintended side effects on the environment and the planet. Controversially, these products also help keep the cost of food down, generally speaking, as farms can prevent crop loss, improving yield. All plant protection products have strict rules for application, more on this below, so keeping compliant with the existing regulations can be a burden on the farm already.
As of today, there are no additional limitations on the usage of these products. However, there is a clear message that all farmers need to regularly report on what they use and that they should expect tighter product use restrictions in the future. The days when farmers could do what they wanted on their own fields are gone; that much is clear. Farmers in the future need to get used to applying chemicals in accordance with integrated pest management (IPM) principles, which are a collection of principles to minimize product usage. The intention of IPM is only to use plant protection products as a last resort, and doing so requires documentation of a cause (pest, disease, etc) to justify the product usage.
In addition to documenting that IPM principles are implemented in the decision-making process, farmers need to maintain an up-to-date record of all chemicals currently stored on the farm.
Farms need to maintain the following at a minimum:
- Pest & disease documentation to stay compliant with IPM.
- Product usage records to stay compliant with existing standards/chemical license requirements.
- Product inventory stock levels to be compliant with national-level standards.
These three areas of data can alone be overwhelming for a farming operation, not to mention the lists of compliance documentation required for heavy equipment usage, worker safety, and livestock operations.
Who decides how pesticides can be used?
When a chemical product ends up at the farm, already many different roles have contributed important data relevant to its usage.
- Agchem companies: Provide product labels, including health and safety instructions, and indicative tank mixes.
- Government food authorities: Define application requirements, including for what purpose for what crop, and in what quantities.
- Agronomists: Recommend use specific to local crop needs.
It is important to keep these roles apart, and it’s important to maintain a track record of who is responsible for what parts. In an ideal world, there would be an open database for these records, but this is certainly not the case.
Currently, the databases are implemented by Government authorities, and they never copy from each other – every one of them thinks they can do it better than the other ones. Our team at Farmable presented at the Inspire Conference this past November and encouraged the EU Commission to standardize their work and documentation of these products across the EU. This would be enormously helpful to all FMS software and ensure harmonized documentation of product usage across EU farms. Doing so would make it easy for farms to choose any FMS and still generate standardized product usage reports that could be easily analyzed by authorities across different levels of government.
Environment versus food supply
What matters more than documentation to farmers, is that over the recent years, more and more chemical products have been banned. The Authorities are weighing two needs against each other. On the one hand, you have positive effects on plant health, which is essential for our food supply. On the other hand, you have negative effects on the environment. In our current political climate, environmental arguments tend to win, even when weighed against food security. Add the current economic realities of running a farm, and farmers quickly become infused by calls for more restrictions which ultimately impact their bottom line.
Better data can help rebalance this assessment.
Product compliance is easy with Farmable
When we initially developed Farmable, it was with the work processes for spraying and fertilizing in mind. In addition to labor management, these are the most important on-farm work processes to document correctly because when they are managed well, they have the biggest impact on people, profits, and the environment.
A chemical product inherently has many attributes that must be managed to maintain compliance. Everything from maximum application rates and maximum volumes per year to minimum days between application and harvest. At Farmable, we enable farm managers to deal with each of these attributes and ultimately make it easier for the farm to stay compliant. If the farmer or farm advisor is about to violate any of these requirements, he or she will get a warning message. Product usage is automatically tracked based on completed spray and fertilizer tasks, meaning your spray log is always up to date. We aim to make managing the many attributes of chemical products as easy and as affordable as possible, so every farm can efficiently manage agchem regulations. If you want to try Farmable Pro, you can test-drive these features for free for 14 days before committing to the annual price of 99 EUR per farm.
Secondly, to manage the product inventory on the farm, we have automated much of the administration work in our latest module, Product Inventory Management. Here, your farm benefits from cost tracking of product inventory and the cost of product used per field. For your compliance requirements, you can also access a continuously updated project inventory list so you always know what is in stock when planning tasks or preparing for an audit.
The workflow is simple:
- Register product purchases in the Farmable App
- Product volumes are automatically subtracted when related tasks are completed
- Recount when needed and easily update inventory levels from the Farmable App
Any time, your product inventory list or product cost calculation can easily be accessed from your mobile or desktop. Adding Product Inventory Management to your Farmable account will cost 129 EUR/year for your farm but will certainly save you hours of frustration reconciling chemical stocks.
With the two modules, Farmable Pro and Product Inventory Management, Farmable users can easily have full control over product-related compliance requirements.
Better data, better policies
Why are we talking about this? Because farmers can’t fight the regulatory changes that are underway. The momentum is too large. And the request to document what chemicals are being used in nature or on the food we eat is not outrageous.
Taking documentation seriously will create a better decision basis for the approval process of new chemical products assessed by Government Authorities. This can lead the discussion back to what chemicals can actually have a meaningful effect on the crops – away from the current unilateral focus on what harm they do to the environment.
So while blockading highways will generate attention in the short term; the long-term strategy requires farms to capture, organize, and share data. Everyone can agree that farmers deserve a seat at the table when it comes to developing agricultural policy. But to be truly heard, farms will need to align their data on product usage and present harmonized, indisputable facts on the utility of chemicals over time. It sounds tedious, but there are good tools out there to support this work. The prize for doing this well goes far beyond approved compliance reports; it can give Europe a real chance at securing both its own food supply and a carbon-neutral continent.